As a result, screengrabs and plot details started appearing online before the official broadcast - which led to fans worrying about accidentally coming across spoilers (which we obviously won't post here).

However, plenty of people had some fun with the leak.

US singer Mariah Carey suggested that she was about to post some "major Game of Thrones spoilers" on Twitter... before going on to upload a picture of herself on the Iron Throne.

A spokesman for AT&T, which owns the service, said: "Apparently our system was as excited as we are for Game of Thrones tonight and gave a few DirecTV Now customers early access to the episode by mistake.

"When we became aware of the error, we immediately fixed it and we look forward to tuning in this evening."

Writing in Forbes, Paul Tassi said: "HBO has to be tearing their hair out that this keeps happening, but this show is so popular and there are so many of these markets to manage, it does almost seem inevitable that something will go wrong.

"At least we're not dealing with people flat-out stealing episodes like we saw in a breach a few years ago, but this is not great either."